7 ms·

Write Code, Crush Foes, Get Hired – Multiplayer Programming Tournament

58 points by gsaines 12y ago

tinco 12y ago
Someone should really retitle this to $512 programming tournament.
- Zombieball 12y ago
  Haha, agreed!
- veemjeem 12y ago
  Yeah, I don't like the trend of eye-catching false advertisements either. In a way, this resembles those infomercials that give you a bunch of random stuff along with the core product and then claim that it's a $500 value that you're getting for free! I would think that they'd want to attract those coders who are not directly interested in cash prizes because anyone with half a brain could tell that the prizes do not match the original $40k advertisement. If you're advertising to a bunch of smart developers, don't treat them like idiots who buy into infomercial style advertising scams. These guys should reconsider spinning the contest as a fun & challenging way to top the leaderboard, and the prizes are just a small token of appreciation for attending the contest.
iMuzz 12y ago
I remember seeing these guys get accepted to Ycombinator on stage at at Start Up School 2013. Cool concept! Here's the link if anyone is interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syoqjYLDs48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syoqjYLDs48
- gsaines 12y ago
  Thanks iMuzz, that was an intense day for everyone, and it's always surprising to see how much of a splash that made!
michaelmior 12y ago
Interesting that there's an option to simulate games to speed up tournament progress. I wonder how the output of the simulation is validated.
- schmatz 12y ago
  Hi michaelmior, Those simulations are used to calculate the public leaderboards during the competition. They aren't used for final rankings as the simulation results need to be validated. However, they provide a nice way for people to gauge their standing. To perform the final ranking/validation, we'll play n of the top games on each team against each other and then sort by wins and losses. We're not quite sure of how large n will be, but I think it will be 150-250. It would be nice to calculate the public leaderboards this way, but as a O(n*m) calculation, it really doesn't scale in practice (we have to strike a balance between accuracy and responsiveness of the ranking system). The public leaderboards are calculated with a Bayesian algorithm. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! :)
  - michaelmior 12y ago
    Thanks for the response! So in theory, a player could game the public leaderboards by returning incorrect results for a simulation? This seems like a reasonable choice.
    - schmatz 12y ago
      Yep, they could. If people start doing that to mess up results, we have ways of remedying that situation. We haven't had to deal with any cheaters thus far as our users are pretty awesome (and there really is no reason to cheat). We'd probably send each game out multiple times and require consensus or run all the simulations ourselves. I don't anticipate having to do anything of that nature, but it's interesting problem to think about!
joshbert 12y ago
I wonder how their last employment program went. Any comments, gsaines?
- gsaines 12y ago
  Really well actually. The TLDR summary is "we got swamped and made 4 placements." We had ~50 good candidates that got in touch, but we took PG's advice to do things that don't scale, which meant I was doing high touch recruiting. About 2 weeks in, we decided to refocus on 12 of the candidates and we placed 4 of those. In the interim we've built out an automated profile system, employer portal, and a bunch of internal tools to scale up so that this time we can handle increased demand. The overall feedback from employers was very favorable. One startup told us that our candidates were 5x more likely to pass technical screens that their other recruiting channels.
  - joshbert 12y ago
    That's a great response, thank you.
    - gsaines 12y ago
      You're quite welcome!
asselinpaul 12y ago
Great to see CodeCombat getting more exposure. I've actually started to use it to teach Javascript to 10 year olds in my local primary school (through a CodeClub I run). It has been a great experience and a lot of kids are moving quickly through the campaign levels. I even have a few kids who moved on to the multiplayer levels. Quick remark: the computers in the school are Core 2 Duo machines with 1.75GB of RAM. They are running the latest version of Chrome on XP but often crash on CodeCombat (lack of RAM?). It's a shame but reloading usually solves the problem. Also, getting coordinates on the map is usually quite tedious (it doesn't seam to work all the time). I am really excited about the future of CodeCombat.
- nwinter 12y ago
  We'll keep working on the RAM needs, but yeah, that is just about the lower limit that I would expect to be able to play the game at all currently. We have a lot of work to do, but don't worry, we'll get it running on older and older hardware as we optimize. Thanks for your patience (and your students'). I've started a GitHub issue to track that coordinate selector bug: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/issues/1038 https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/issues/1038 – appreciate the bug report! Interestingly, we have a 10-year-old who hangs out in our dev chat and helps us playtest and simulate. He actually came up with a strategy that did pretty well on the ladders for this latest one, and we'd challenge our other (existing developer) playtesters to c'mon, surely you can beat the 10-year-old! Looking to the future, we have some ideas to push that younger and younger, too.
  - asselinpaul 12y ago
    Oh wow. Please tell me he's French (although in an english school). That might be one of my students, he ranked 7 on a multiplayer level! I might have a go at a few bugs over the summer after I finish my high-school exams.
    - nwinter 12y ago
      Oh, which player is your student? Our ten-year-old is American, actually.
pjbrunet 12y ago
Have some self-respect. If this was any other profession, a contest like this would not be tolerated. If people get the idea programmers work for free, as long as you have a clever contest, that idea becomes popular and it's bad for all of us in the long run. The fact there's lots of prizes here doesn't change the underlying problem. Contests, in any field, devalue the profession. Even if I was a high school teacher (winning this might look good on a resume) I would still tell my students to avoid contests because: Why work for free when you can work for money and have an even greater feeling of accomplishment? When I was in high school (20 years ago) I had paying clients and paying subscribers and had won programming contests and I still value the real-world work experience more than the contests. As someone who won lots of contests in school: sometimes they are rigged, often the prizes never materialize, often it's free publicity (great photo opportunity) for whoever organized the contest. Live and learn.
- pdenya 12y ago
  I don't know why you're so down on this. It's a competitive game that looks fun, no one is forcing you to take part. The code created here isn't even useful for any other purpose! It's not some 99 designs contest for code, it's like the Stripe CTF challenges if anything.
  - asselinpaul 12y ago
    Agreed, I don't believe they are taking advantage of you.
- gsaines 12y ago
  Hey pj, sorry you feel that way. I can assure that our intent here is not to get cheap labor, the code that people write won't be usable to use in any way by us or third parties, so as pdenya mentioned you should only enter the contest if you think it's fun!
  - pjbrunet 12y ago
    The part about "let us help you find a job" sounds condescending, as if the industry wasn't begging for developers that can actually write code. I would argue any developer that understands the Traveling Salesman Problem is turning down job opportunities left and right. Call me a skeptic but if you don't care about the code, then sounds like the ulterior motive is to screen/recruit young developers and get some publicity. In any case, I'm glad you're concerned about my feelings. I'm not attacking you, I'm attacking the trend. The only type of contest I believe in is a contest for charity. Anyway, you knew the contest would be a risk when you came up with the idea, right? http://www.quora.com/What-legal-issues-come-up-when-running-a-contest-or-giveaway http://www.quora.com/What-legal-issues-come-up-when-running-...
aiiane 12y ago
> Custom CodeCombat Wizard (est. $500 value) Really?
- gsaines 12y ago
  Yeah, artwork is surprisingly expensive if it's customized. Obviously it's possible to get really cheap artwork, but we've found that quality and reliability are worth paying for. We also allow every winner to iterate the design a few times to get what they want.
  - grey-area 12y ago
    What is a code combat wizard and why would we be interested in having one? It sounds like some sort of in-game reward or skin for your avatar, and giving it an imputed value of $500 is pretty optimistic. Has anyone ever paid $500 in cash for a CodeCombat Wizard? NB that the value delivered is not related to the cost for you to produce it. You might consider putting in an explanation of what these things are and why they are worth more than the services you're giving away with a link on the text, and putting them at the end of the list, because for most people not familiar with your game the value for an in-game character or avatar will hover just above $0.
aiiane 12y ago
I wonder if the marketing copy of this is inherently biasing it away from women. This isn't to say that there aren't plenty of women who like to "crush foes" - but societal norms are definitely still in the realm of associating that with men.
- Dewie 12y ago
  Though 'crush foes' is just rpg/fantasy-speak for 'beat your opponents'. So they would have to take the competition-part out of it if they wanted to change it.
- gsaines 12y ago
  We pay a lot of attention to the way we position our site content, and thought this was in line with the copy for other competitive games. I don't think that competitive games are inherently masculine or feminine, but the critique is valid: competitive games I'm familiar with do tend to rely on marketing language that's more targeted at men.
- dang 12y ago
  This comment does not deserve to be downvoted. It's thoughtful and asks a legit question. All: when you see substantive, civil comments in faded-out territory, please give them a corrective upvote.
malloreon 12y ago
A company blog with no clickable link to the main page?! In 2014?! EDIT: it's there if you widen your browser super wide
- schmatz 12y ago
  Hi malloreon, You can find the link to the main site in the middle of the top bar of the blog where it says "Click Here for the Main CodeCombat Site".
  - sp332 12y ago
    That doesn't show up if the window is too narrow. And "too narrow" is pretty wide.
    - schmatz 12y ago
      Good catch! I'll have to send some feedback to the guy who runs the blogging platform.
higherpurpose 12y ago
My experience with CodeCombat: Pros: I liked it, and I find it fun to learn to make a game that way. Cons: I found the "campaign" shockingly short - like 10 missions or so, and a few of them weren't even working (stuck on loading). After finishing that campaign, I found the jump to the "user-created" missions too high. I would've expected at least a 50 mission campaign, that walks me through to the more advanced concepts, until most of the user-generated ones feel easy.
- nwinter 12y ago
  Which levels didn't load for you? I'll check it out. Sorry about that! The campaign is certainly short a few thousand levels. It will take time for us to get there, since making good programming levels is a challenge even when you aren't trying to fit them into a cohesive campaign. We'll get there, though. Lots to do!
maikklein 12y ago
Funny I just started to learn Clojure 2 days ago and dropped it because I lost interest in it. I always wanted to join some AI competition and this might actually be fun. The sad part is, there are no game rules. Yes he explained them a little bit in the blog but it was way too broad. Also there is no tutorial on how to get started anywhere. I am assuming I need this https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat
- gsaines 12y ago
  Hey Maikklein, did you start playing? We built a mini-tutorial into the level itself, along with documentation and API details. We also have a rules tab on the ladder page that describes how the tournament works in broad strokes. If you still have questions, drop us a line at team@codecombat.com
  - maikklein 12y ago
    Oh, then it was my fault! I didn't even think to press the play button because I haven't written any code yet. Now I am seeing the interactive tutorial. Thanks
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
iandanforth 12y ago
Is there an API you can use to submit code and get back simulation results and stats?
- schmatz 12y ago
  That's a great idea! I'll add it to my todo list. Right now, there isn't a nice and well documented way to do this as we haven't ever had demand for an API like that. You can reverse engineer the POST for the code ranking to submit your code and the GET for the leaderboard information.
- schmatz 12y ago
  Also, could you email me at michael@codecombat.com with details on what stats you'd like to have access to?
missblit 12y ago
I've been playing around with the challenge in python, but I've been completely unable to get (nested) classes working. Which is too bad, without classes it's much harder to coordinate a bunch of peons.

58 points by gsaines 12y ago

tinco 12y ago

Someone should really retitle this to $512 programming tournament.

Zombieball 12y ago
Haha, agreed!
veemjeem 12y ago
Yeah, I don't like the trend of eye-catching false advertisements either. In a way, this resembles those infomercials that give you a bunch of random stuff along with the core product and then claim that it's a $500 value that you're getting for free! I would think that they'd want to attract those coders who are not directly interested in cash prizes because anyone with half a brain could tell that the prizes do not match the original $40k advertisement. If you're advertising to a bunch of smart developers, don't treat them like idiots who buy into infomercial style advertising scams. These guys should reconsider spinning the contest as a fun & challenging way to top the leaderboard, and the prizes are just a small token of appreciation for attending the contest.

iMuzz 12y ago

I remember seeing these guys get accepted to Ycombinator on stage at at Start Up School 2013. Cool concept! Here's the link if anyone is interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syoqjYLDs48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syoqjYLDs48

gsaines 12y ago
Thanks iMuzz, that was an intense day for everyone, and it's always surprising to see how much of a splash that made!

michaelmior 12y ago

Interesting that there's an option to simulate games to speed up tournament progress. I wonder how the output of the simulation is validated.

schmatz 12y ago
Hi michaelmior, Those simulations are used to calculate the public leaderboards during the competition. They aren't used for final rankings as the simulation results need to be validated. However, they provide a nice way for people to gauge their standing. To perform the final ranking/validation, we'll play n of the top games on each team against each other and then sort by wins and losses. We're not quite sure of how large n will be, but I think it will be 150-250. It would be nice to calculate the public leaderboards this way, but as a O(n*m) calculation, it really doesn't scale in practice (we have to strike a balance between accuracy and responsiveness of the ranking system). The public leaderboards are calculated with a Bayesian algorithm. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! :)
- michaelmior 12y ago
  Thanks for the response! So in theory, a player could game the public leaderboards by returning incorrect results for a simulation? This seems like a reasonable choice.
  - schmatz 12y ago
    Yep, they could. If people start doing that to mess up results, we have ways of remedying that situation. We haven't had to deal with any cheaters thus far as our users are pretty awesome (and there really is no reason to cheat). We'd probably send each game out multiple times and require consensus or run all the simulations ourselves. I don't anticipate having to do anything of that nature, but it's interesting problem to think about!

joshbert 12y ago

I wonder how their last employment program went. Any comments, gsaines?

gsaines 12y ago
Really well actually. The TLDR summary is "we got swamped and made 4 placements." We had ~50 good candidates that got in touch, but we took PG's advice to do things that don't scale, which meant I was doing high touch recruiting. About 2 weeks in, we decided to refocus on 12 of the candidates and we placed 4 of those. In the interim we've built out an automated profile system, employer portal, and a bunch of internal tools to scale up so that this time we can handle increased demand. The overall feedback from employers was very favorable. One startup told us that our candidates were 5x more likely to pass technical screens that their other recruiting channels.
- joshbert 12y ago
  That's a great response, thank you.
  - gsaines 12y ago
    You're quite welcome!

asselinpaul 12y ago

Great to see CodeCombat getting more exposure. I've actually started to use it to teach Javascript to 10 year olds in my local primary school (through a CodeClub I run). It has been a great experience and a lot of kids are moving quickly through the campaign levels. I even have a few kids who moved on to the multiplayer levels. Quick remark: the computers in the school are Core 2 Duo machines with 1.75GB of RAM. They are running the latest version of Chrome on XP but often crash on CodeCombat (lack of RAM?). It's a shame but reloading usually solves the problem. Also, getting coordinates on the map is usually quite tedious (it doesn't seam to work all the time). I am really excited about the future of CodeCombat.

nwinter 12y ago
We'll keep working on the RAM needs, but yeah, that is just about the lower limit that I would expect to be able to play the game at all currently. We have a lot of work to do, but don't worry, we'll get it running on older and older hardware as we optimize. Thanks for your patience (and your students'). I've started a GitHub issue to track that coordinate selector bug: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/issues/1038 https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/issues/1038 – appreciate the bug report! Interestingly, we have a 10-year-old who hangs out in our dev chat and helps us playtest and simulate. He actually came up with a strategy that did pretty well on the ladders for this latest one, and we'd challenge our other (existing developer) playtesters to c'mon, surely you can beat the 10-year-old! Looking to the future, we have some ideas to push that younger and younger, too.
- asselinpaul 12y ago
  Oh wow. Please tell me he's French (although in an english school). That might be one of my students, he ranked 7 on a multiplayer level! I might have a go at a few bugs over the summer after I finish my high-school exams.
  - nwinter 12y ago
    Oh, which player is your student? Our ten-year-old is American, actually.

pjbrunet 12y ago

Have some self-respect. If this was any other profession, a contest like this would not be tolerated. If people get the idea programmers work for free, as long as you have a clever contest, that idea becomes popular and it's bad for all of us in the long run. The fact there's lots of prizes here doesn't change the underlying problem. Contests, in any field, devalue the profession. Even if I was a high school teacher (winning this might look good on a resume) I would still tell my students to avoid contests because: Why work for free when you can work for money and have an even greater feeling of accomplishment? When I was in high school (20 years ago) I had paying clients and paying subscribers and had won programming contests and I still value the real-world work experience more than the contests. As someone who won lots of contests in school: sometimes they are rigged, often the prizes never materialize, often it's free publicity (great photo opportunity) for whoever organized the contest. Live and learn.

pdenya 12y ago
I don't know why you're so down on this. It's a competitive game that looks fun, no one is forcing you to take part. The code created here isn't even useful for any other purpose! It's not some 99 designs contest for code, it's like the Stripe CTF challenges if anything.
- asselinpaul 12y ago
  Agreed, I don't believe they are taking advantage of you.
gsaines 12y ago
Hey pj, sorry you feel that way. I can assure that our intent here is not to get cheap labor, the code that people write won't be usable to use in any way by us or third parties, so as pdenya mentioned you should only enter the contest if you think it's fun!
- pjbrunet 12y ago
  The part about "let us help you find a job" sounds condescending, as if the industry wasn't begging for developers that can actually write code. I would argue any developer that understands the Traveling Salesman Problem is turning down job opportunities left and right. Call me a skeptic but if you don't care about the code, then sounds like the ulterior motive is to screen/recruit young developers and get some publicity. In any case, I'm glad you're concerned about my feelings. I'm not attacking you, I'm attacking the trend. The only type of contest I believe in is a contest for charity. Anyway, you knew the contest would be a risk when you came up with the idea, right? http://www.quora.com/What-legal-issues-come-up-when-running-a-contest-or-giveaway http://www.quora.com/What-legal-issues-come-up-when-running-...

aiiane 12y ago

> Custom CodeCombat Wizard (est. $500 value) Really?

gsaines 12y ago
Yeah, artwork is surprisingly expensive if it's customized. Obviously it's possible to get really cheap artwork, but we've found that quality and reliability are worth paying for. We also allow every winner to iterate the design a few times to get what they want.
- grey-area 12y ago
  What is a code combat wizard and why would we be interested in having one? It sounds like some sort of in-game reward or skin for your avatar, and giving it an imputed value of $500 is pretty optimistic. Has anyone ever paid $500 in cash for a CodeCombat Wizard? NB that the value delivered is not related to the cost for you to produce it. You might consider putting in an explanation of what these things are and why they are worth more than the services you're giving away with a link on the text, and putting them at the end of the list, because for most people not familiar with your game the value for an in-game character or avatar will hover just above $0.

aiiane 12y ago

I wonder if the marketing copy of this is inherently biasing it away from women. This isn't to say that there aren't plenty of women who like to "crush foes" - but societal norms are definitely still in the realm of associating that with men.

Dewie 12y ago
Though 'crush foes' is just rpg/fantasy-speak for 'beat your opponents'. So they would have to take the competition-part out of it if they wanted to change it.
gsaines 12y ago
We pay a lot of attention to the way we position our site content, and thought this was in line with the copy for other competitive games. I don't think that competitive games are inherently masculine or feminine, but the critique is valid: competitive games I'm familiar with do tend to rely on marketing language that's more targeted at men.
dang 12y ago
This comment does not deserve to be downvoted. It's thoughtful and asks a legit question. All: when you see substantive, civil comments in faded-out territory, please give them a corrective upvote.

malloreon 12y ago

A company blog with no clickable link to the main page?! In 2014?! EDIT: it's there if you widen your browser super wide

schmatz 12y ago
Hi malloreon, You can find the link to the main site in the middle of the top bar of the blog where it says "Click Here for the Main CodeCombat Site".
- sp332 12y ago
  That doesn't show up if the window is too narrow. And "too narrow" is pretty wide.
  - schmatz 12y ago
    Good catch! I'll have to send some feedback to the guy who runs the blogging platform.

higherpurpose 12y ago

My experience with CodeCombat: Pros: I liked it, and I find it fun to learn to make a game that way. Cons: I found the "campaign" shockingly short - like 10 missions or so, and a few of them weren't even working (stuck on loading). After finishing that campaign, I found the jump to the "user-created" missions too high. I would've expected at least a 50 mission campaign, that walks me through to the more advanced concepts, until most of the user-generated ones feel easy.

nwinter 12y ago
Which levels didn't load for you? I'll check it out. Sorry about that! The campaign is certainly short a few thousand levels. It will take time for us to get there, since making good programming levels is a challenge even when you aren't trying to fit them into a cohesive campaign. We'll get there, though. Lots to do!

maikklein 12y ago

Funny I just started to learn Clojure 2 days ago and dropped it because I lost interest in it. I always wanted to join some AI competition and this might actually be fun. The sad part is, there are no game rules. Yes he explained them a little bit in the blog but it was way too broad. Also there is no tutorial on how to get started anywhere. I am assuming I need this https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat

gsaines 12y ago
Hey Maikklein, did you start playing? We built a mini-tutorial into the level itself, along with documentation and API details. We also have a rules tab on the ladder page that describes how the tournament works in broad strokes. If you still have questions, drop us a line at team@codecombat.com
- maikklein 12y ago
  Oh, then it was my fault! I didn't even think to press the play button because I haven't written any code yet. Now I am seeing the interactive tutorial. Thanks
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

iandanforth 12y ago

Is there an API you can use to submit code and get back simulation results and stats?

schmatz 12y ago
That's a great idea! I'll add it to my todo list. Right now, there isn't a nice and well documented way to do this as we haven't ever had demand for an API like that. You can reverse engineer the POST for the code ranking to submit your code and the GET for the leaderboard information.
schmatz 12y ago
Also, could you email me at michael@codecombat.com with details on what stats you'd like to have access to?

missblit 12y ago

I've been playing around with the challenge in python, but I've been completely unable to get (nested) classes working. Which is too bad, without classes it's much harder to coordinate a bunch of peons.